Imitation of Life
by Havoka
Summary: A glitch in Lilly's programming curses her with a new insight about the virtual world she 'lives' in. (Consists of two short, correlated stories with a common theme - character sentience. Rated T for mild language. No pairings.)
1. Consciousness

Consciousness

"Lilly?" Lee called softly, tapping on her door. "You got a minute?"

"Come in." She replied weakly, her voice muffled. He pushed the door open to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, face buried in her hands.

Lee took a seat at the checkers table by her bedroom window, recalling the time he had tried to teach her how to play. The game had ended with pieces strewn across the floor, a very irritated Lilly wiping them off the board with a swipe of her arm. Afterward, he remembered, they had actually laughed if off – but Lilly never laughed now. That part of her, the stubborn but likeable fire, had long since burnt out.

"You know," He lifted his eyes from the table, settling them on the woman in front of him, "I'm worried about you, Lilly. Lately you've been saying all sorts of weird things..."

She raised her head from her palms, her once-passionate eyes now dull and lifeless. "You don't understand, Lee." She croaked in a hoarse tone. "None of you do. I see things that nobody else can see. I can see the fibers of our world, the way it all comes together." She shook her head, her empty eyes still fixated on him. "Our lives are all just scripted code. I saw it myself." Her argument derailed into senseless rambling as she spouted off about programming and plotlines and pre-determined fates. Lee watched her with a heavy heart, realizing for the first time just how far gone she really was.

"I know you don't believe me." She whispered, her voice cracking. "But it's all true. I found the source code that contains all of our data. It weaves this world together like a storybook – we're all just plot devices in a fake universe. We were created for someone's entertainment!" She waved her arm, encompassing the scenery around them. "It's all just fiction..."

A look of great sadness found its way into Lee's features as he remained silent. "Lee," She begged, her tone growing desperate, "There's no one I trust in this group more than you. _Please _don't dismiss me as crazy. Please, listen to me. The others don't understand, they've already written me off. Give me a chance, a way to somehow prove I'm right."

Lee shook his head slowly. "Lilly, I want to believe you. I really do. But what you're saying, it's just...insanity. You're acting paranoid, and-"

"You don't even have to say it, you know." Lilly said in a low, emotionless voice. "I can fucking read it, right underneath you."

Lee raised an eyebrow, leaning back in uncertainty. "The hell are you talking about?"

"Every time you go to say something, a bunch of lines of dialogue show up in front of you. They disappear after a few seconds, and then you say one of the things that was listed there. It happens constantly." Her explanation was flat and matter-of-fact. She sounded so convinced, so certain she was right. Whatever craziness she may have been dreaming up, it was reality to her.

Lee wondered how she could have slipped so far in such a short span of time. He rose to his feet, arms still folded across his chest in disbelief. "I'm sorry, Lilly. Maybe you'll prove me wrong, but-"

"-but I can't just believe claims like that without any evidence." Lilly finished, voice monotone, as though she were reading from a book.

"...Yeah." Lee replied, stupefied. "That's exactly what I was gonna say."

"What a shock!" Lilly spat, rolling her eyes. "Maybe you'll believe me now?"

Lilly had taken the words straight out of his mouth, verbatim, before he'd had a chance to speak them. How could she have possibly known exactly what he was going to say? Could it be that, maybe, she was right?

Before he could ponder it further, a blinding flash encapsulated the tiny room.

Once it dimmed, he found himself wondering why he was in Lilly's room in the first place. She was staring up at him from her bed expectantly. "Lilly, I...uh..." He tried vainly to remember what had brought him there.

"I need to talk to you." She began, nodding to the table by the window. "Sit."

Still confused as hell, Lee took a seat. She ran her bony fingers through her dry hair, sighing in exasperation as she waited for him to settle in.

"Supplies are missing, and I need your help..."

/

A desk lamp overhead cast a glaring white light down upon a piece of paper, stashed on top of an office desk. On that paper a multitude of notes were scribbled, some with red underlines. Beside it, a glowing computer monitor displayed The Walking Dead Game's beta test run. A man, a computer programmer, sat hunched in front of it, studying the characters on the screen while still taking notes.

"How's it coming?" Another man appeared in the office doorway, glancing down at the programmer and computer screen.

"Pretty good." The other man responded, his brow furrowed as he continued to stare at the monitor. "I can't seem to work this bug out of Lilly, though. She's fine until episode 3, then her character starts glitching and her dialogue gets all garbled."

"Huh, let me see." He took a few steps into the office, studying the game more closely. Sure enough, Lilly's movements were jerky and disoriented, her speech nonsensical. "Hm. Maybe there's a typo in the code somewhere."

"I'm thinking it might be this." He opened another window, filled with letters, numbers, and symbols. Then he highlighted a string of characters and deleted them, entering a few slightly different symbols. "She's supposed to be talking about missing supplies, but it looks like she doesn't wanna go along with that." He changed a few more symbols, pasting her dialogue into a new area.

"Well, we _did_ make her stubborn as hell." The other man joked.

Despite his frustration, the programmer cracked a smile. "Ha, yeah." He agreed. "Maybe a little _too_ stubborn."

As soon as the programmer applied the changes, Lilly's glitching seemed to calm down. "Hey, I think I got it." The man exclaimed as Lilly began to discuss the stolen supplies with Lee. "She's working all right now."

"Awesome." They were both excited to have the game working properly. "You know, it's a shame she's leaving soon, I really like her character."

"Me too, even though she's been a bitch to program."

"Isn't that how she's supposed to be?" They both shared a laugh, relieved that her error hadn't been critical.

The seated man reached over to the paper on the desk, crossing out 'ep 3 Lilly glitch' and writing 'FIXED' over the words.


	2. Am I Alive

Am I Alive

"You're not coming with us."

Lilly watched helplessly as the remainder of their group piled back into the RV. "I'll die out here." She whimpered, eyes locked on Lee even as he walked away from her.

Soon they were gone, nothing but red tail lights in the distance. Walkers emerged from the forest on all sides, swarming her. Hopeless, but determined to survive, Lilly sprinted away from the monsters.

_If I can just outrun them, I might have a chance-_

Without warning, she slammed off of an invisible barrier. The impact sent her sprawling, landing in a heap of her own tangled, lanky limbs. Pulling herself together, she leapt to her feet, wondering what the hell she had crashed into.

The walkers closed in around her, snarling and biting. Her situation made no sense – she could see the open road in front of her, but when she tried to run toward it, she was greeted by some sort of invisible wall. "What is this?" She whimpered, clawing helplessly at the barrier. "What the hell is this?"

A walker reached out for her with its decaying arms, ready to consume her. She backed up against the wall, closing her eyes as she pressed up against it. She knew there was no escaping them, and she readied herself to meet her fate.

A few seconds passed, a strange silence settling over the land. Nothing happened. Lilly re-opened her eyes to find that, somehow, the walkers had all vanished. And not only them, but it seemed as though the _environment itself _was disappearing. Row by row, the thick underbrush of trees vaporized into nothing. In their place, a solid, unyielding blackness crept forward, encroaching upon her with a frightening steadiness. _What's going on? _The road, the pavement she stood on soon faded from view, leaving nothing but absolute darkness surrounding her. She was no longer on a street in the forest. She was now inside an empty void, a non-world so vacant she couldn't see even the faintest hint of anything.

"Am I dead?" She wondered out loud, trying to fill the emptiness with at least the sound of her voice. Her words did not echo or reverberate, and she realized there mustn't be anything around for the sounds to bounce off of. She attempted to move forward, and found herself no longer standing, but floating through the void. "Is this what death is like?"

Nothing around her, no one to greet her. Not her frail, sickly mother, not her strong-willed, stubborn father. Not even her childhood pets appearing to guide her. Just...no one.

As she drifted through the emptiness, something triggered a buried memory. Suddenly she was assailed with them, the bits of recollection that had been squelched within her programming. _I'm not dead._ She had seen her own code. She was made of code. She was a video game character. The realizations flashed back to her, locked away until that moment._ I can't be dead._

_I was never even alive._

Her entire life – her aspirations and goals, her friends, family, and love interests – they had all just been programmed into her. _Does that even make me a person?_ Her frayed mind struggled with the concept. _Do I have a soul?_

A warm, tingling sensation began to course through her body as she navigated the blackness. She glanced down to find her feet dissolving into tiny specks of blue light, drifting away before fading out in the inky darkness. _What if I don't?_ Her thoughts grew panicked as she tried to fight off the soothing sensation that was breaking her body up into a million bytes of data. _What if there's no afterlife for us? How will I see my Dad again?_

The tingling grew stronger, drawing her into its warm embrace as her ankles and eventually her legs evaporated into countless fragments of code. _Did my existence even matter?_ Her thoughts grew more vague as she closed her eyes, surrendering to the gentle pull of data erasure. _Am I just going __to...go away?_ Her fingers began to disintegrate, followed shortly by her hands and wrists.

_I hope I at least mattered...I hope I meant something to someone._ Her entire body glowed softly, radiating a faint turquoise light as she faded into nothingness.

_I hope I didn't disappoint anyone..._


End file.
